Best British nature writing: nightingales, peregrines and other bird books to read

British writers and poets have been inspired by nature, and most notably birdlife, for many centuries. One of the regrets that I have with regard to my French birding friends is that it is rare that I can share the wealth of literature that exists in the English language with them; like myself, they mainly prefer to read in their mother tongue.

A famous poem that has marked generations since it was written in 1819 is Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats. Nightingales are the national bird of both Ukraine and Iran, a coincidence from happier times. Inspiring Keats, this poem explores the themes of human nature, transience and mortality in contrast to the unbound “full-throated ease” of the bird’s song, which through the ages has entered the ears of human listeners and, as such, has achieved immortality. It is a moving poem, not optimistic like Keats’s earlier poems, and perhaps foreshadowed Keats’s imminent death just a few years later.

Be that as it may, I remember reading the poem as a boy and being touched by it. Little did I know that I would end up living in a nightingale-rich area.

The rarely seen ‘night singer’

The first time that I ever heard a nightingale singing was, appropriately, at night. It was in 1989, whilst I was in the process of moving to France and was travelling in a van. I had stopped for the night to rest beside a wooded copse. Sleeping outside, I woke after a couple of hours to this torrent of flutey music pouring from the wood, extraordinarily loud in the silence of the night.

Equally capable of singing during the day, this “night singer” (from Old English galan, “to sing”) is a bird that is rarely seen. They are furtive and hide away in woodland, and more often than not fly away if you try to creep around to watch them. The notes can be so loud that many times I have been convinced that I must be within touching distance of this little brown bird, but have accepted that I must be content with the song coming through the leaves.

First published in 1967, The Peregrine by J.A. Baker is a book that opened the ornithological world to a wide audience. He is credited with the resurgence of nature writing that is a strong force today, notably in such writers as Tim Dee, Robert Macfarlane and many others, who stand at the pinnacle of this genre in the modern era.

The context of Baker’s work was particularly poignant as it was set against the apparent extinction of this apex predator, which was under attack from the effects of agrochemicals such as DDT. These chemicals cause eggshell thinning as they pass up the food chain, accumulating in these extraordinary birds, the fastest animals on the planet. He tracked this elusive winter migrant daily, criss-crossing the Essex landscape on his bicycle for a period of some 10 years, learning its habits, discovering where it roosted and seeing what it killed, all in the harsh chill of winter, when survival is the sole aim of much of its prey.

There has been much controversy about this work, even scepticism about its accuracy; he describes seeing things that almost no one else has been capable of observing. He himself wrote: “The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” Perhaps this phrase captures the uniqueness of his observations. Reading it, one senses the possibility of actually experiencing the reality of another creature’s life, something almost shamanistic in character, which fitted well into the context of the 1970s when it became widely read and influential.

But above all, there is the sheer quality of the writing, as this shy and unassuming man, whose formal education finished at the age of 16, went on to produce a masterpiece of poetic literature.

Happily, the chemicals were banned, extinction was avoided, and these wonderful birds are back in impressive numbers. They are no longer hard to see, nesting today on the towers and steeples of towns and cities. The photo above of a nuptial flight shows the difference in size between the larger female and the smaller male; this is common among raptors.

A lighter touch is found in the works of Simon Barnes. He has the delightful ability to reveal the natural world to the uninitiated with humour and anecdote. The very title of one of his early books, How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher, catches the attention in just the right way.

He bookends delightful observations and insights into the natural world with jokes and, more often than not, ends with a glass of beer in his hand in the pub, indulging in the summer evening occupation of “swifting”. It is interesting to discover that many comedians – Bill Oddie and Bill Bailey, to name just two – are birders and naturalists. I sometimes think that the well-known British sense of humour is something from which the rather more serious side of the French birding community could profit.

Above all, he makes it all sound like fun, which, despite the large dose of patience and persistence inevitably required, it really can be. He is, of course, far from being a bad birdwatcher. His latest book, Spring Is The Only Season, is packed with such meticulous research and explanation of the intricate workings of the natural world that, having just finished it, I want immediately to re-read it.

There are many more wonderful nature writers in the anglophone world, and I have arbitrarily chosen three who have been an inspiration to me personally. Certainly there is a wealth of such work in French, but perhaps not as developed as in English, where the ability to combine factual knowledge with a more lyrical approach is highly respected.